


the day all the birds stopped singing

by robotsdontcry



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28870818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotsdontcry/pseuds/robotsdontcry
Summary: You are a boy and the world is not a kind place.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 20





	the day all the birds stopped singing

**Author's Note:**

> cw: mentions of death, mild body horror and anxiety, generally not a good time

_The decisive war is the other one_ — _to become fully human,_ _  
__which means to become compassionate, honest, brave._

+

“What do _you_ want, Link?”

He’s perched on the ledge just outside of Zelda’s room, swinging his legs back and forth, the stone sharp and cool beneath his palms. Zelda leans out of the windowsill beside him. She’s resting her chin in her hands and staring out at the distant shapes and colors of Castle Town, but also appears to be looking at something very far away. He frowns and watches her watch something he can’t see.

It’s a cloudless day today, and there’s something sweet in the air; probably the chrysanthemums. He had used his sword to hack together an impromptu bouquet of flowers from the palace gardens, somehow managed to evade the guards in the process, and proudly presented them to Zelda when he reached her room, which had earned him a smile. Only later did he remember that she doesn’t like chrysanthemums. He’ll have to keep that in mind for next time.

But Zelda is looking at him now, gaze expectant, and—oh. She asked him a question.

An odd question, to be honest. He hadn’t ever stopped to think about it ever since the ocarina was placed in his hands and the Great Deku Tree had told him he had a great destiny in store for him. Destiny. That’s all people seem to talk about these days. They come to him with requests and look up to him like he is their savior. He wants to help them. He wants to give and give and give. It feels good to be needed.

“What do I want?” he repeats.

“Yeah,” Zelda says. Her eyes are the same color as the sky, which today is clear and blue. Her gaze is thoughtful, and a little sad. Was it the chrysanthemums? His mind runs through all the possible reasons she could be sad and ends up with nothing. Sometimes she looks much older than she actually is, with eyes that could pierce through your soul and wisdom enough to make the best of men go insane. Link is suddenly very glad that she’s his friend.

“I want to save the world.”

“No, after that.” A stray cloud passes overhead, throwing a shadow over the courtyard. He doesn’t think he understands. Zelda pauses, taking in his confusion. 

“The world doesn’t need heroes during peacetime,” she says, very slowly. Her tone is almost gentle. “What will you do then?”

+

On his first day in Clock Town, he gets lost too many times to count. After an afternoon of playing hide and seek with the Bombers and running into dead ends every five minutes, he receives the password to the observatory, cuts all the grass in town, subsequently gets yelled at, and manages to gather enough Rupees to buy a map from Tingle. He even has an extra few Rupees to spare, so he purchases an apple from a street vendor and sneaks it into the observatory, where he munches on his apple while having an existential crisis looking at stars and space dust.

The apple is sweet and crisp. It reminds him of the apples back in Hyrule, which he could pluck from low-hanging branches and eat lying on his back in the grass, staring up at the wide expanse of blue and letting his mind go empty. But here apples don’t grow on trees and the sun and moon exist in the sky at the same time and home is an ocarina, not a place.

He has three days to stop the moon from falling. The moon grins down at him, as if this were all just some elaborate practical joke. There must have been a punchline at some point. Maybe it was when the Skull Kid stole his ocarina and killed his horse, or when he looked at his reflection in the pond and wanted to run away from what he saw. Or even before that, when the gods decided it would be a good idea to send him back in time after he saved the world once. Well, he missed the punchline. He thinks this must be a dream. Nothing feels real here, and time seems to have a mind of its own. The days feel short but the seconds are bone-achingly, mind-numbingly long.

Why is he here? Is this another gift from the gods? Was the sword not enough? 

The thing is, he didn’t want the sword. The sword chose him, so he pulled it out of the ground and woke up seven years later in a world where evil was about to win the war. And somehow, the strangest thing was not that his friends were either dead or missing but that he couldn’t crawl through small spaces or use his slingshot anymore. There was no time for him to play hide and seek with those missing years. He was handed a new body and told to save a world that had always treated him as the other. The world needed him, or at least that’s what he was told. 

The thing is, he did everything he was supposed to do. He pulled the sword out of the ground and defeated the evil king and saved the princess. He saved Hyrule. No one told him what came next.

No one told him how lonely it would be.

+

Night of the final day. He is in the last room of the Woodfall Temple before the boss and has not yet figured out that he's supposed to solve the puzzle by staying on the left side of the room and shooting the diamond with his bow, then turning into a Deku Scrub and launching his way up to the correct flower. Instead, he is taking the long route and trying to avoid the flying monsters in his path, when the earth starts shaking violently and he’s nearly knocked off his feet. It occurs to him that this is not a joke.

There’s something about the end of the world that makes you want to either cry, laugh hysterically, or curl up into a ball and pretend nothing is real. Tatl is a vibrating sphere of light hovering around his face, screaming at him to hurry, but his feet are rooted to the ground. Fear is a thin film on the back of his neck. He has to fight against every fiber of his being to keep going, but as soon as he reaches the boss room, the temple starts collapsing for real. The boss knocks him halfway across the room before he can get in a single hit. The walls are coming down.

He takes out his ocarina with trembling hands.

+

Sheik comes to him in a dream. Somewhere around Attempt to Save the World Number Seven, Link had stopped trying to stay awake for all thirty-six hours straight like a maniac, and found a pile of wooden crates in an abandoned alleyway that he could arrange into a fort, curl up against the cold stone and surrender to the persistent feeling of heaviness that only got stronger the longer he spent in this place. These days Tatl has been letting him sleep more, for better or worse, which means he starts remembering his dreams when he wakes up.

In this dream, Link is an adult. He and Sheik are in the Lost Woods, sitting on two tree stumps in the middle of a clearing. A thin silvery mist swirls through the trees. The sky is dark and starless. The clear notes of a harp ring through the air and hang there, suspended like light in open water.

Link puts his ocarina to his lips, but no sound comes out. When he looks down, the grass is not there. Water is lapping at the base of the tree stump, reflecting nothing but the gaping black hole above.

“I missed you,” he says before he can stop himself.

Sheik raises one eyebrow, listening.

“It’s nice being with you,” Link says, and barrels on. “You don’t talk much.” His ears are hot. He feels lame. When was the last time he had spoken to another human being? What is he even trying to say? His throat feels hoarse from underuse. 

“I don’t like people,” he confesses to the sea at his feet. It’s pooling around his ankles now, cool and colorless and shapeless. “But with you—I don’t know. It’s different.”

Sheik puts their harp down. Their eye, the one that’s not shielded by bangs, peers out at him. Inside lives a familiar pain; Link often sees it in the mirror. On Sheik loneliness is both dreadful and beautiful, and Link is overcome by the strange urge to reach out and pull their scarf away from their face. But they say nothing, so he waits. The water has reached his knees.

Sheik has always been able to speak volumes through their silences. They remind him of Zelda so much it hurts.

“Do I have to go back?” he says in sudden desperation.

Their voice, when they finally speak, is cold. “The people need you, Link.”

“I'm not their hero.”

The water is at his arms now. His shoulders. His neck. It’s not gentle anymore. It swells and heaves and tugs at his skin and clothes, an untamed sea. Sheik makes no move to help him. They just keep staring, their one eye pinning him like a death sentence.

“You _are_ a hero.”

His face. He opens his eyes, lungs heaving.

+

You are you are not you are you. You are a monster and your screams sound foreign to you. Every time you put on a mask you feel as though your mind is being ripped apart and the voices in your head get so loud that you want to hurl yourself into the sea. Head in hands, gasping for air, but no sound comes out. You don’t want it anymore. You want a new body, a new mind, a new heart. You’re tired. You want to go to sleep and never wake up. You wonder if anyone will notice.

You are not brave. You are terrified. You are a boy and the world is not a kind place. You were given a sword and a bow and some arrows and some bombs and tossed into the snapping jaws of the world, dropped into the middle of a war called life. The rules of war are simple: kill or be killed. Mere existence is not an option, especially when there are eyes on you at every moment. The eyes, the expectations, the silent judgement. You have learned that you are safe when you are strong, and you are strong when you are silent. But does that make you a hero, when all you have ever known is fear? Bone-deep, teeth-rattling fear?

The world lied to you. The world gave you a sword to wield and a war to fight, but all this time it was the wrong war. You were so focused on making your way out alive that you didn’t even notice the other, more important, war—the war to become a human being. To not lose sight of yourself in the midst of the fighting. To feel at home in your own skin. To feel sorrow, and joy, and love.

You are a boy and your fate is too big for you. When you pulled the sword out of the ground, it fit perfectly in your hands and your heart sank. Take it, they kept saying. I don’t want it, you tried to say. But they insisted. It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this. Take it, take it. It’s yours now. It belongs to you. 

And in the end, when the war is over, will anyone remember your name?

+

“You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?”

The next time Link ends up back in the tower, his mind is still trying to wrap itself around the fact that he saw the moon fall, when he pitches forward and vomits out the only measly meal he’s eaten in the past thirty-six hours. But he did. He saw it. He had been sitting under a tree in Termina Field and playing a song on his ocarina when he watched the moon fall. He saw the world burn and the oceans surge and a sunset so beautiful it brought him to tears. He saw the mountains turn to ash and the world end a hundred different ways and the Skull Kid, dancing in the midst of it all.

In one of the timelines, he saw Zelda. He was perched on the ledge outside her room and swinging his legs back and forth, and she was leaning out the windowsill beside him. But in this timeline, he had given her lilacs instead of chrysanthemums, and there were no magic swords or sages or evil kings. He was just a boy, and she was just a girl, and she was looking at him. What do _you_ want, Link?

He looked at her and opened his mouth—and the world passed away.

The Happy Mask Salesman peers at him. His actions are scripted: he will ask for his mask and realize Link does not have it. He will become angry. Go find my mask. Oh, and by the way, you only have three days. Link would cry, or curse, but what is there left to curse? He feels numb. If only home were a place he could go back to.

“Am I dead?” he asks.

The Happy Mask Salesman tilts his head. This isn’t part of the script. “I don’t know,” he says. “Are you?” 

Link frowns. “I don’t think so.”

“No, I don’t think so either.” The Happy Mask Salesman appears to be deep in thought. Finally, something like understanding dawns in his eyes, and he leans back. He seems satisfied with himself. “You’ve died many times,” he says.

Link doesn’t answer. Instead, he tries very hard not to pass out. The clock ticks on. Somewhere to the east the sun starts to rise, although they can’t see it. The residents of Clock Town stir awake, ready to begin the first day. The music starts playing, the dogs start barking, and death continues its inexorable march. When he opens his eyes, the Happy Mask Salesman is still staring at him.

The gods are dying and the world is on fire and you are not fine, but you go into the world and watch people go about their business as though everything were fine. You are the only one who can save them. Your shoulders are already tired from carrying the weight of one world—you didn’t ask for another. And the world is always watching you, evaluating you not for who you are but for who it wants to see you as. Boy-hero. The chosen one. The Hero of Time. How do you live with it? How do you make your peace in a war that someone else told you to fight? 

“Time is running out,” the Happy Mask Salesman says. “What will you do?”

“Sleep,” Link says.

Yesterday, he failed. Tomorrow, he will try again. But today, he closes his eyes like a dead man, and lets the darkness swallow him whole.

**Author's Note:**

> if you can't tell, i love the legend of zelda.
> 
> quote at the top is from the magnificent defeat by frederick buechner. also, disclaimer: i've only completed around 25% of majora's mask, so please don't come after me if i get anything wrong. but ocarina of time is one of my favorite games of all time so this was only 5 years in the making
> 
> thanks for reading!


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